In order to be able to survive tough times, each of us must
strike a delicate balance between the imperative to fit into our society (and be
moral) and the capacity to betray our fellows at precisely the right time - not
too early and not too late. We seek a
balance between the impulse to cooperate in a group and need to react
appropriately when it is time to defect from that group. In the modern western world, the times we
live in are not particularly tough, even among the more disadvantaged (gone are
the days when we might break a window to steal a loaf of bread in order to heroically save our starving nieces and nephews).

In good times, we are biased towards morality and we now have
huge industries built around punishing defectors. Given our increased wealth, it could be
argued that the modern western person is less likely to defect than someone
from, say, 200 years ago (which would explain the decline of violence). This certainly has positive sides, but it can
go too far to the extent to which our "morality" leads to self-harm,
especially when we factor lost opportunity into the harm calculus.

MacAskill, I suggest, verges on self-harm when he carves
away at the economic margin between modern comfort and survival. By doing so, he pushes himself towards a
situation in which he would not survive should his conditions deteriorate. The rational approach is to look towards increasing
your economic margin, while taking into account other relevant factors - for
example, for the purposes of survival there comes a point at which being richer
just increases the risk that you will be killed for your wealth. As an academic, unless his books are
spectacularly successful, MacAskill will not be in a situation in which his
wealth is so huge as to be unconducive to his on-going survival.

So, on the surface, what I read into his unbounded willingness
to aid others is an indication that his morality is poorly calibrated for
survival in extremis. He does talk about
preserving yourself so as to not burn out too quickly (as an altruist) and to
maximise your longer-term altruism, for example an expensive suit might prevent
money being donated to worthy causes if you bought it today, but your ownership
of it may permit you to secure a well-paying job thus allowing you to donate
much more in the future.

MacAskill is saved from actual self-harm in a couple of
ways. Firstly, there is the framing of his
legacy survival. Who MacAskill is and
how he behaves is an essential part of his legacy and therefore children
(should he have any) would not necessarily be his sole method of ensuring
legacy survival. Others who follow his
example, however, and who won't have their names and legacy attached to the
organisations that MacAskill has created would likely be self-harming should
they donate as much of their earnings as he seeks to - if that level of
donation puts their other legacy survival efforts at risk.

The other way he is protected from self-harm is that he
would be building up a certain amount of good will, should times turn tough and
he finds himself in financial straits he could likely cash in that good will
and make it through - but only so long as he hasn't convinced all his friends
and colleagues to ruin themselves financially.

Aside from self-harm, there is another concern that I have
with his efforts, involving the concept of moral self-licensing. It is a known
feature (some might say a bug) of psychology that when we have done something
good, particularly something very good, we may feel entitled to either do
something bad or forego doing something else that is good. Alcohol advertising, for example, highlights
this idea when it is suggested that by having put in a full day's work or
prevailed in some sporting event, you have somehow earned the right to get
drunk (in moderation).

My concern is two-fold.
Firstly, this altruism movement may trigger bad behaviour and act as an
enabler for ongoing bad behaviour. The
idea that large numbers of people might feel entitled to behave poorly due to
their altruism is worrisome.

Secondly, there is the issue of perception. We are naturally inclined to see others as
largely neutral (mythical saints aside) and so, if people were as
ostentatiously "good" as MacAskill strives to be, the more cynical
among us would wonder what they were compensating for. Therefore, if altruism were to go too far, it
could paradoxically lead to reduced trust within our societies.

I don't think that MacAskill is covering up some moral
culpability, merely that he is morally confused. His approach is a very nice idea, in the
hypothetical, and one that, in the hypothetical, we should all strive for
(meaning that it is beneficial to persuade others that, in the hypothetical,
such ostentatiously good people are what we would want to be). In practice, however, such ascetic extremes
of goodness are a bit weird, relatively few of us could comfortably approach
emulating them and we are left with an impression that the person involved is,
at best, somewhat naïve.

It is this naivety that is possibly most problematic, when
we consider MacAskill's zeal in spreading the word. All traits which have survival implications
have a range of expression in the relevant population. There are benefits in being big and strong
and there are benefits in being small and flexible, depending on the
conditions. If a population became
entirely big and strong due to the prevailing conditions and those conditions
changed, then the entire population could fail.
We are protected from this by a sort of regression to and variance around
a mean, so that the small flexible still exist in times that are best for the
big and strong and when being big and strong is no longer optimal, the small
and flexible take over (while not dominating entirely so that a swing back
doesn't wipe out the population).

The same applies to variations in morality. Today, in relatively good times, we have
people who are more inclined to steal and kill than we are willing to accept
and we punish them. But under extreme conditions,
these are precisely the sort of people who would ensure the continuation of our
clans while people who are too touchy-feely starve to death or are slaughtered
in their beds.

To be able to survive, which I argue is what morality is
really all about, we have to be able to be bad when conditions call for
it. We need to be able to
look out for ourselves and while doing maximum good in the world, simply for
its own sake, sounds like a brilliant idea in principle, turning our minds to
this sort of thing in practice risks disarming us at the very moment when we are
most vulnerable, making us miss the signs that conditions have changed for the
worst and we may soon be required to reap the benefit of our morality – or be
erased from the Earth.